After realizing that the pumpkin in our garden was not ripe yet and thus the Brown Pumpkin Ale would have to wait I decided I still had the itch to brew something and I've had this basemalt idea in my head for a while now. Simply put, I'm brewing up four SMaSH beers; one gallon a piece with two pounds of basemalt, half an ounce of EKG hops and a half package of US-05 in in each. Gravity should hit around 1.045, with about 30IBUs. Last night I brewed up the Vienna and the Maris Otter and everything went surprisingly smoothly. I mashed the Vienna, transfered it to a boil kettle and after fifteen minutes of boiling I mashed in the Marris Otter. I figured this way I would have 15 minutes post-boil in order to chill the Vienna, clean the boil pot and get back upstairs to remove the bag from the Maris Otter. I hit it almost perfectly!

I unfortunatley missed some of my numbers. Shooting for 65% brewhouse efficiency without sparging I was a little low, closer to 60%, which dropped my beer toward the lower end of what I was looking for but I'm sure that won't matter. Tonight, when I do the Munich and the Rahr 2-Row I'm going to save a gallon of water out for a sparge. I thought about making my grind finer but in the name of science I've decided to keep that constant to see if the sparge will get me any higher. We'll see, Beersmith is telling me my Mash Efficiency was at around 80%.

I love experiments like this. I need to start running some of my own. I've been using MO in a lot of beers, and I've liked it so far, but there's always a lot of extra flavors clouding exactly what it's contributing. The same goes for Vienna, although I do finally have an all Vienna blonde ale that will be ready to drink soon.